The Devil's Breath Read online

  THE DEVIL’S BREATH

  THE DEVIL’S BREATH

  By R. R. Irvine

  To Kate Duffy

  and

  Pat O’Connor

  THE DEVIL’S BREATH

  Copyright © 1982 by Robert Irvine

  All Rights Reserved.

  First eBook copyright © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  978-1-4821-0205-5 Trade

  978-1-62460-668-7 Library

  Cover photograph © iStock.com.

  Other eBooks by R.R. Irvine:

  Robert Christopher Series

  Jump Cut

  Freeze Frame

  The Face Out Front

  Ratings are Murder

  Moroni Traveler Mysteries

  Baptism for the Dead

  The Angels' Share

  Gone to Glory

  Called Home

  The Spoken Word

  The Great Reminder

  The Hosanna Shout

  Pillar of Fire

  Nicolette Scott Mysteries

  Track of the Scorpion

  Flight of the Serpent

  Wake of the Hornet

  The Return of the Spanish Lady

  Thread of the Spider

  Novels

  Horizontal Hold

  The Devil’s Breath

  Footsteps

  Barking Dogs

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  1

  THE CRACK echoed across the valley like thunder running before a storm. Only Jack Graham recognized it for what it was—man-made thunder, probably from a large-caliber rifle.

  The car window on his, the passenger’s, side was already open an inch or so as a precaution against the foul smell emanating from the station wagon’s noisy heater. But now, cold or no cold, Graham awkwardly cranked the glass all the way down and listened carefully. For a moment he heard only the rush of icy wind.

  Then the second explosion came, a sound that seemed to roll right over the car. Definitely a rifle shot, he decided and ducked low in his seat, briefly wondering if someone might be shooting at him. Then he shook his head; he was hardly a target worthy of assassins, even though his luck in the past few months had gone from bad to near-fatal.

  He glanced at his driver, sighed, then quickly scanned the mist-shrouded landscape. There was nothing on the road ahead. And nothing behind them either.

  “Look,” said the woman beside him. She took one hand from the steering wheel to point up the mountainside, which formed a natural wall next to the road’s inside lane. “Up there. Three of them.” Her foot came off the accelerator and the station wagon began to slow.

  Her one-handed driving brought sudden panic to Graham, who so clearly remembered his own auto accident and who, at the moment, was gaping at the steep cliff on the far side of the road. Only when both her hands were again on the wheel did he look up the mountainside.

  A canopy of early-morning mist cut off the top of the valley into which they were descending. Overall visibility was limited to a couple of hundred yards.

  “I don’t see any—” Graham bit off his words as he spotted a trio at the edge of the mist.

  The woman began braking sharply.

  “Do you know them?” he asked, his voice tight. Rifle shots were not his idea of a welcome.

  “I can’t tell at this distance.” The car came to a stop. He felt totally vulnerable and was opening his mouth to protest her action when she continued. “It must be somebody from Moondance though. Probably that TV crew I was telling you about, the one we sent out search parties to look for. City people are good at getting themselves lost.”

  “You don’t suppose it could be a hold-up?” Having asked, he felt slightly ridiculous, if not paranoid.

  She squinted at him. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t see how. I mean, how would they know we had anything to steal. We don’t, do we? Besides, there’s nothing to stop me from ignoring them and heading right on into town.”

  “A rifle bullet.”

  “They aren’t bandits,” she said. “See for yourself. They’re waving at us now.”

  She was right, although he still felt uneasy.

  “I haven’t had a hold-up to write about in over a year,” she continued with a hint of irony in her voice. “Why, the last crime I put in the paper was nothing more than a prank. Kid stuff.”

  “Shooting off a gun like that could get someone hurt.” His reflexes, not his brain, caused his new artificial hand to make a jabbing gesture. It was meant to emphasize his point, but the plastic-covered mechanical fingers overshot and thunked dully against the window glass.

  “It’s unusual, I admit.” The woman, Harriet Wilcox, had told him she was the editor of the Moondance Ledger. To hear her talk, there was nothing to report in that Utah town but church news.

  Graham retrieved his hand. What was it the therapist had promised? Oh, yes. Lifelike realism. Skin texture to match your own.

  He dropped the appendage into his lap and stared at it. Like hell it was lifelike. Only babies had skin like that.

  “I don’t like guns,” Graham said. “I never did.” Two years in the army had taught him they were designed for one purpose only, and that was to kill.

  “You can relax,” Harriet said. “I recognize them now. The one in uniform, that’s our sheriff. He’s not one to fire off a shot without good reason. They must need help . . . and badly.”

  The men were about a hundred yards away now, steadily working their way down the mountainside toward the car and State Highway 30. Every so often they disappeared from sight as they wound their way around outcroppings of sharp gray rock.

  There wasn’t another car in sight on the lonely road leading into Moondance, Utah. For that matter, Graham hadn’t spotted a single vehicle since the station wagon turned off the main highway thirty miles hack.

  Graham, tired and grimy after an all-night bus ride, closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the trio of men had reached a particularly difficult place, a granite molar that had decayed on one side to form a jagged rock fall. Their progress became painfully slow.

  “One of them looks like he might be hurt,” she said. She sounded personally concerned.

  Graham nodded. The man in the middle was moving at what could best be described as a constant stumble. Twice, while his forward progress continued, he twisted his torso around to peer behind him. And each time he almost fell. Only quick work by his companions kept him from taking a headlong plunge down the mountainside.

  “If I didn’t know our mayor better,” she said, “I’d think he’d been drinking.”

  Graham jerked around to look her in the face, to see if she was serious. He’d known Harriet Wilcox all
of two hours now, not much time to give him insight into her character. One thing was certain though: She wasn’t grinning at him. But then, he had yet to see her smile. Even when they’d first met, forty-five miles back in the town of Kamas, her face had remained impassive, although she had walked right up and offered him a ride.

  “How do you know where I’m going?”

  She stepped closer, then shook her head at him. She was pretty, though she did her best to hide it, with brown hair cut so short that it precluded any kind of styling, and rimless glasses that made no concession to fashion.

  “The bus driver told me,” she answered. “The fact is, I’m your only chance. If you don’t ride with me, God knows how you’ll ever get to Moondance.”

  “You don’t even know me. I could be a mugger . . . or worse.”

  “You’re Jack Graham, old Lew’s nephew. I heard that from the bus driver, too, at least the Mr. Graham part. The rest I figured, because you happen to look a lot like the old boy.”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re lucky,” she continued. “This is the first time in weeks I’ve come into Kamas. That fact is I only came in to pick up a package that arrived on your bus.” She held up a small parcel as if to verify her story.

  He immediately felt uneasy at not being able to carry it for her. But he was having trouble enough with his own two suitcases, one of which held his paints and brushes, so much dead weight really. He should have tossed out the stuff back in Los Angeles. What use were the tools of a trade no longer open to him? None. But he hadn’t the guts to destroy his past completely.

  He shifted the heavy suitcase full of memories to ease the strain on his artificial hand. He knew that he should have been wearing the hook, just as his therapist had suggested. Learn with the hook, then graduate to the hand. And remember, the hand is more cosmetic than anything else. The hook is practical.

  She led the way to a faded blue station wagon that was parked in front of the bus station. Once they’d stowed his suitcases in the back, she gestured expansively with her hand. “Kamas is the end of the line as far as Greyhound is concerned.”

  “So I learned . . . the hard way.”

  She started the car. A half mile later it was as if Kamas had never existed. The only break in the aspen and pine forest was the two-lane highway. The beginning of the high Uintas loomed above.

  Even in May the peaks were covered with snow, and the steep granite walls crisscrossed with crevices of ice. The wind had swept the sharpest crags free of snow, and they looked like slabs of stone that had been thrust up through the earth’s crust during a violent eruption. It was an awe-inspiring vista that made him feel less like an artist than ever, for these were not the backdrop kind of mountains with which painters filled commercial canvases. These mountains were more like temples that had been erected to pacify vengeful gods. They marked the entrance to northeastern Utah’s high country, a quarter million acres containing peaks never climbed by man, unnamed lakes, and places seen only from the pressurized cabins of airplanes seven miles up.

  After several minutes of silence, Harriet began sounding like a journalist at work. “Why are you going to Moondance?”

  “My uncle’s place . . . he left it to me when he died.”

  “Everybody knows that. You were the only one he ever talked about at the end. Except maybe that crazy Indian friend of his.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Yeba Kah. Nobody you’d know,” she said curtly. Then her head nodded slowly. “Old Lew was proud of you being a successful artist.”

  “I only met my uncle once, when I was here as a child.”

  “So this is hardly a homecoming.”

  “Home is where you are,” he answered. “My father and I lived in Salt Lake until I was eighteen. So for all practical purposes I’m a Utah boy.”

  Harriet turned to stare at him. The car swerved across the center line, causing Graham to catch his breath.

  “You don’t mean to tell me,” she said through clenched teeth, “that you’re going to live in Moondance?”

  “Why not? It’s my land now. A house and twenty-five acres. What more could a man want?”

  “I’ll be damned. A lot of people are sure going to be surprised.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough without me telling you. Say, didn’t you receive an offer for your land?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I suppose that’s common knowledge too?”

  “Naturally. You’re going to have to get used to that sort of thing if you want to live in a small town.”

  “I plan to keep to myself as much as possible.”

  She made a gesture of disbelief. “It was the town council that made you the offer. Wasn’t it enough?”

  “I didn’t want to sell then, and I don’t now.”

  “You’re a strange one. You take after your uncle. He was a local character, you know. You’re going to have to go some to better him.”

  “I don’t want to compete with anyone.”

  “It can be lonely here.” There was a sigh in her voice and no wedding ring on her finger, a fact that surprised Graham. She asked what he was thinking. “Are you married?”

  “Divorced,” he said flatly. What he didn’t say was that he’d driven away his ex-wife, Noreen, made her life miserable until she had no choice but to leave him. He’d done it deliberately, because he couldn’t bear the thought that he, a cripple, could keep her only through charity.

  “What about you?” he countered.

  “This is Mormon country,” she answered slowly, “where the word is, Be fruitful and multiply. All my friends have large families. But me? I have the Ledger. I’m what’s known locally as the nonbelieving spinster.”

  His lips tightened, registering surprise. He would have bet money she was a Mormon.

  “I inherited the paper from my father,” she said. “And now I’m editor, reporter, and janitor.”

  “You look like a very eligible young woman to me,” he had said.

  At the moment, however, she looked more tense than anything else. He felt the same way listening to the eerie whine of wind sweeping off the Uintas. The sound was like a knife blade against his spine, forcing him back to harsh reality.

  The men were more than halfway down the mountainside. He was about to comment on their progress when he had to turn away so that she wouldn’t see the pain on his face as the bitter morning cold touched off a phantom spasm in the missing fingers of his right hand. Pain that shouldn’t be there, not after this long; pain, his therapist suggested, that may be only in Graham’s mind.

  To hell with it, he thought, gritting his teeth against the vicious throbbing. He reached across with his left hand and opened the car door, pulled up the flimsy collar of his California coat, and stepped out onto the windswept road. There was a smell of sage and pine in the air. A deep breath stung his lungs.

  Graham took his eyes off the men on the mountain long enough to peer over the edge of the cliff. Moondance, miniaturized by distance, looked unreal nestling in the bottom of a glacial valley. The road dropped a good thousand feet as it spiraled down toward the town that was so close by parachute yet miles away via asphalt.

  Raising his sight to the mountain, he saw that the three men were very near, easing down the last few feet of loose rock to the shoulder of the road. They looked bone-weary, their faces set in shock, like soldiers coming out of battle. The man in the lead, the sheriff, had a rifle slung over his shoulder. The mayor was still having trouble staying on his feet, mainly because he was using only one arm for balance. Beneath his other arm he fiercely clutched a green plastic bag. His face was like nothing Graham had ever seen before. It was the face of a man back from the dead.

  2

  THE FIRST thing the sheriff said after catching his breath was, “I didn’t know you had a stranger with you, Harriet. Otherwise . . .” He rattled his rifle; he seemed to be indicating that he wouldn’t have fired a wa
rning shot if he’d known she wasn’t alone. At least, that was the way Graham read the gesture.

  “He’s not exactly a stranger,” she replied as the three men piled into the backseat of the station wagon. “He’s Lew Graham’s nephew.”

  Once Graham and Harriet resumed their places in the front seat, she introduced the local men who’d come off the mountain: Mayor Hiram Benyon, Sheriff Alden Fisk, and Del Timmons, still another member of the town council.

  The mayor shook hands.

  Timmons asked, “What are you doing in Moondance?”

  Graham felt the man’s hostility. From the mayor, Graham sensed wary caution.

  “Well?” the sheriff said, his tone neutral.

  Harriet came to Graham’s aid. “That can wait till later, Alden. Right now, I want to know what happened to that TV crew?”

  “Dead!” came the cryptic reply from Timmons, who now held the green plastic bag on his lap.

  With a jerk of her head, Harriet looked to the mayor for confirmation.

  Benyon blew out a noisy breath. “It looks that way.”

  “We don’t know for sure,” said the sheriff.

  “Ha,” came the comment from Timmons.

  “Let’s get going,” Harriet said. “Suddenly, I’m freezing.”

  Graham was turned sideways in his seat so he could watch the trio of townsmen behind him.

  Over the starting roar of the engine, the mayor said, “They have to be dead. After what we found, there’s no other possible conclusion.” He had been staring out the window, his head craned awkwardly to peer back up the mountainside. “There!” he said. “Just inside the mist. Something moved.”

  The sheriff opened the door on the other side of the car and stepped out onto the highway. “I don’t see anything. It must have been your imagination.”

  Timmons, who was in the middle of the backseat, laughed. “I told you no good would come of this. Strangers mean trouble.”

  “I saw something,” the mayor insisted.

  “He’s been like that ever since we found the bodies,” Timmons put in. “Or what was left of them.” He spoke with relish.

  The sheriff got back into the station wagon, closed his door, and locked it. “They were ripped to pieces.”